Some of humanity's oldest literature may describe volcanoes erupting 34,000 years ago
Literature comes from the Latin for letter, yet much of it was never written down. Aboriginal Gunditjmara stories from south-western Victoria tell of volcanic eruptions, and a 2020 study dated two nearby volcanoes to between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago, hinting that spoken tradition can carry memory across astonishing spans.
In its broadest sense literature means any body of written work; in a narrower sense it refers to writing treated as art, above all novels, plays and poems. Before the 18th century, Western Europeans used the word for books and writing of every kind. Some modern definitions have swung back towards that inclusiveness, with cultural studies now weighing popular and minority genres alongside the canon, and non-fiction forms such as diaries, letters, memoirs and essays can count too. The opposite approach restricts the term to fine writing: the 1910 to 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined it as the finest thought expressed in the finest words.
The Latin root, litteratura, meant learning, grammar and writing made with letters. That origin makes the phrase oral literature awkward, and scholars have floated oral forms or oral genres instead, though the older label persists. The screenwriting teacher Syd Field captured a related tension when he called his own trade a craft that sometimes reaches art.
Oral storytelling appears across every region people have lived. Australian Aboriginal cultures have maintained spoken histories over tens of thousands of years. The Budj Bim and Tower Hill dating, published in February 2020, sets a minimum age for human presence in Victoria and may support the idea that Gunditjmara eruption stories rank among the oldest surviving traditions. An axe discovered under volcanic ash in 1947 had already shown people lived there before Tower Hill blew.
The earliest poetry was probably chanted or sung as a way to hold onto history, family lines and law. One specialist in the field argues that oral tradition, far from being a primitive stage, has been the dominant way our species communicates. Printing later spread written works ever wider, and the digital age now blurs electronic literature into other media.
Source: Literature
